Just a few months ago, when I first heard that the Kazakh government had decided to revamp their language, specifically, to latinize their alphabet, I was immediately brought back to the early 20th century Turkish language modernization campaign led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. I had been so intrigued by the results of this event that I got giddy knowing that I would be living a term in a country presently undergoing such a transition. The political significance of Atatürk’s language transition was not to be understated. As the language became easier to learn, literacy rates spiked within major cities and the countryside, and international commerce and globalization were two of the doors that opened as modernization set in on the new Turkish nation. As I looked more into the Kazakh (or “Qazaq” as it’s now written in the latin script) language, the similarities between these events became apparent. For one, Qazaq is a Turkic language with elements of Arabic and Persian — confusing enough on its own. It was once written using the Arabic alphabet (like Turkish), then when Soviet presence made its way to the East in 1929, it was changed to use the Latin alphabet, and then in 1940, in an effort to nationalize and unify the USSR, the language was decreed to be written using cyrillic letters. The unity of this still newly forming nation, just as in Turkey, required a national script.
But as we approach the modern day, we see another transition, again with distinctly “political” motives. In 2017, then-president of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev directed that the Qazaq language shall be written using the latin script by 2025 (the deadline has since moved back). According to Nazarbayev, this movement is in part to separate the country from its Russian and Soviet past. By distancing itself further from Russia (as many nations are doing given Russia’s political tendencies in the past decade), Qazaqstan is able to define its own path as a rapidly developing cultural hub in Central Asia. The transition is also meant to unify the language. Qazaq’s current fractured state creates almost three languages each written in their own script. “We cannot understand each other. We can’t understand writing. It distances us,” Nazarbayev claims.
As a foreigner living in Almaty, the quickly-modernizing, always-awake (trust me, I hear semi trucks honking throughout the night), commercial capital (not the actual capital) of Kazakhstan, I see Nazarbayev’s point. If I came into this city without any understanding of the languages, I might have thought this city is pentalingual – Russian, English, Arabic, Qazaq (which looks like Russian with some extra characters and its vowels out of place), and some other Latinized language. Though there is some pattern of which language is where, at times it feels like a 10 year old who just learned how to change the font got ahold of a Word document.
But generalized patterns do prevail. Government buildings tend to use the new Qazaq and occasionally Russian, while fast food restaurants are seemingly stuck with the old “Kazakh.”
English has found its niche in Qazaq culture: that is, as a symbol of novelty and vanity. English dominantes in the modern, Western or Westernized shops around Esentai Mall lined with fancy imported cars getting valet parked. Above the mall looms the Ritz-Carlton building one Kazakh poet, Pavel Bannikov, in The Illustrated Guide to the Meanings of Almaty, described as the “Eye of Sauron.” Stores display their menus and perfume lines in English along with Russian. All coffee shops use English words transliterated into Russian (ex: Айс каппучино; lit: Ais kappuchina) on their menus. Those words mean nothing to Russian or Qazaq speakers. Though one could say the same about American coffee shops using Italian words on our menus (ex: cappuccino). What matters here is not the actual use of English, but the appearance of it. As long as a word “gives English,” that’s enough to jack up the prices to American standards. Typos in English lettering on storefronts and t-shirts are commonplace and just serve to show the irony of the semi-globalized world.
However, English is not the only language of the future. Nazarbaev’s efforts to modernize Qazaq have not been for naught. Qazaq-language lower and upper schools are common around Almaty (likely the country, too). Many ambitious cafes and restaurants are publishing their menus in the new Qazaq script. Police cars stand out not only because of their always-flashing blue lights, but also because they feature only latin-based Qazaq. The language is also a workaround for many immigrants coming from Uzbekistan, and China, as Russian is less spoken there than Qazaq. My host family’s housekeeper, Замира is from Uzbekistan and speaks less Russian than I do, but she is able to communicate through Qazaq perfectly.
English and Qazaq are (slowly) becoming the languages of Qazaqstan due to outside pressure from the government, and internal desire to separate from their colonial past, which many do not have fond memories of. Though transitioning at different rates, Qazaq has become a language not only confined to the countryside, but one that has begun to penetrate the cities and be a sign of the new times, a time less associated with Russia.
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